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Taxation Without Sanitation Is Tyranny”: Civil Rights Struggles Over Garbage Collection in Brooklyn, New York During the Fall of 1962 by Brian Purnell

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Taxation Without Sanitation Is Tyranny”: Civil Rights Struggles Over Garbage Collection in Brooklyn, New York During the Fall of 1962 by Brian Purnell “Taxation without Sanitation is Tyranny”: Civil Rights struggles over garbage collection in Brooklyn, New York during the fall of 1962 by Brian Purnell During the early 1960s, many residents of Bedford-Stuyvesant saw the neighborhood's filthy streets as a sign of their community's low status in New York City. The trash that accumulated on sidewalks and in streets crowded public space with its bulk and its stench. Children had to play around hulky abandoned cars. Pedestrians on their way home from work dodged rats and vermin that darted from the asphalt to alleyways where bags of uncollected household garbage sat festering, sometimes for days at a time. Over the years, residents periodically complained to elected officials and appointees to the city's Sanitation Department, but the problem only worsened. Bedford-Stuyvesant inhabitants even organized periodic neighborhood clean-ups through local block associations. (2) Their efforts brought temporary relief to certain areas, but failed to remedy completely the overall problem. At its root, the abundance of garbage was linked to the scarcity of resources in this overcrowded residential area. Bedford-Stuyvesant required increased garbage collection and the city was failing to provide it. That this was a neighborhood with one of the fasting growing Black populations in the entire city added a racial insult to an already odoriferous injury. As historians Harold Connolly, Clarence Taylor, Craig Wilder and others have meticulously shown, Bedford-Stuyvesant was a community shaped by two different histories: the hope and optimism of its working class families, of which Blacks were at one point one group among many; and the racial ideologies and policies that slowly made the community an overcrowded, economically stagnant and racially segregated black neighborhood. Over the course of the nineteenth century, transportation developments in the form of rail lines and trolley cars that crisscrossed Brooklyn's north-central thoroughfares transformed the area from a sleepy farmland hamlet to a bedroom community for working- and middle-class families. Irish, German, Scottish, Dutch, and a sizable community of people of African descent, who labored in King County's downtown business and commercial districts that centered on the waterfront, made their home in the towns of Bedford and Stuyvesant Heights. During the antebellum period, black people established two independent communities in Bedford--Carrville, founded in 1832, and Weeksville founded in 1838. Bedford's population continued to soar after the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge completed in 1883, and the nation's first elevated railroad stations stretched across Brooklyn in 1885. By 1920, Bedford and Stuyvesant Heights combined and became known as Bedford-Stuyvesant and throughout the 1940s the neighborhood was racially integrated (49 percent white and 51 percent black) and one of the few communities in New York City where African Americans and West Indians could purchase their own homes. (3) All of that changed during 1950s and 60s. Economic and political policies that went into affect during the New Deal played on racial fears and prejudices and caused middle and working class whites to abandon the community. Discriminatory policies that "redlined" the neighborhood, which were sanctioned by banks and real estate agencies under the banner of New Deal home owners' development programs in the 1930s, made it impossible for Bedford-Stuyvesant residents to finance home improvement projects. Realtors practiced "blockbusting" tactics, which reaped for them handsome profits but also contributed to the deterioration of the neighborhood's housing. Real estate agents played on racial fears and plummeting real estate prices to convince white homeowners to sell their property. The area's brownstone and limestone houses, became carved-up into three, sometimes four apartments. On top of that, bigots refused to rent apartments or sell homes to black families in other parts of Brooklyn, which would have relieved overcrowding in the neighborhood and placed less strain on its housing stock. From the 1950s through 1960, Bedford-Stuyvesant quickly became the largest black neighborhood in Brooklyn and, by 1970 it was one of the most populous urban areas in Black American. It also received some of the poorest levels of service from the city, especially in the area of garbage collection. (4) Abandoned cars, rusted and stripped of their usable parts, were permanent fixtures on blocks. Empty iceboxes and refrigerators, death traps for youngsters, remained in vacant lots, even after residents made repeated calls to Department of Sanitation officials to have them removed. Bedford-Stuyvesant's garbage resulted in foul odors, attracted all kinds of vermin, and produced widespread filth, assaulting the senses and threatening health. When city government seemed reluctant to do anything about the situation, many residents in the community argued it was because the area's residents were overwhelmingly black and poor. During the summer and fall of 1962, members of the Brooklyn chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which was one of the most active civil rights organizations in the borough, chose to address this issue. After two years of leading dynamic campaigns in Brooklyn against racial discrimination in housing and employment, Brooklyn CORE's interracial membership was ready to employ innovative nonviolent tactics to redress Bedford-Stuyvesant's "garbage problem." The chapter had already established its reputation as an activist organization through an aggressive campaign against landlords who discriminated against African Americans, which culminated in a lengthy assault against one of New York City's largest housing conglomerate, the Lefrak Corporation. Brooklyn CORE also made national headlines when it staged a dramatic sit-down during a campaign against employment discrimination at the Ebinger's Baking Company. (5) By addressing the garbage issues in Brooklyn's largest black neighborhood, Brooklyn CORE continued to make its mark as one of New York City's most recognizable grassroots activist organizations. The chapter already had a reputation for successfully turning everyday local political concerns into hot-button civil rights issues, and drawing attention to the problem of inadequate garbage collection in Bedford-Stuyvesant was a logical project for this small, audacious group of activists. With its campaign against inadequate sanitation services in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn CORE took its fight directly to the highest seat of political power in the city. Although there were local elected officials with seats on the city Council and in the State Assembly, the Mayor and his appointees in the Department of Sanitation controlled citywide garbage collection policies. Bedford-Stuyvesant had representatives on the City Council and in the State Assembly and State Senate, but only City Hall had the power to remedy problems with sanitation services. Still, the chapter also pressed borough-level politicians to advocate for better services in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which helped gain publicity for the cause. Brooklyn CORE also hoped that everyday people in Bedford- Stuyvesant might become emboldened by a community-wide effort that fought City Hall for improvements in their quality of life. Chapter leaders imagined that mobilization around this issue would spark a wider movement against local forms of racial discrimination. Dubbed, Operation "Clean Sweep," the campaign was a test of Brooklyn CORE's ambitiousness and creativity. Moreover, Operation "Clean Sweep" challenged the mettle of Brooklyn CORE's members. Would they have the resolve to continue using nonviolent direct action protest to fight against racial injustice even as they faced seemingly insurmountable obstacles? Operation "Clean Sweep" revealed how easily those in positions of power could use "culture of poverty" arguments to explain Bedford-Stuyvesant's poor sanitation conditions. These tactics absolved politicians of any responsibility for the neighborhood's inadequate services and deflected the onus back onto the very citizens who were forced to suffer the everyday effects of living in neighborhoods overrun by garbage. Blaming excess trash on poor people instead of poor policies also justified the continued practice of diverting resources away from communities that, over the years, had become the most in need of improved services and the most severely neglected by elected officials. In many ways, Operation "Clean Sweep" revealed one of the most imposing foes civil rights activists in New York City faced in many of their campaigns during the early 1960s: an entrenched government bureaucracy filled with powerbrokers who, instead of instituting policies that resulted in immediate and tangible changes, often blamed problems of racial discrimination on the behavior and culture of black and Puerto Rican citizens themselves. The number of daily sanitation pick-ups in Bedford-Stuyvesant did not increase from the 1940s to the 1960s, a time in which its population exploded and became overwhelmingly African American. (6) Over ten years before Brooklyn CORE began Operation "Clean Sweep," citizens in Bedford-Stuyvesant complained to the Department of Sanitation and the Mayor about the infrequent garbage collection. While investigating the problem during the spring of 1962, Brooklyn CORE chairmen Oliver Leeds met with members of a block association in Bedford-Stuyvesant who showed him a community newsletter
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